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Thanks everyone for coming out! For the next 3 weeks, we’ll be Playing and Rating the games you created.You NEED ratings to get a score at the end. Play and Rate games to help others find your game.We’ll be announcing Ludum Dare 36’s August date alongside the results.

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I tried thinking of something clever, but completely failed – I had a couple of great two-player ideas but the problem with those is they require two players and are awful when it comes to voting therefore.

So I’m opting for the 10second waves in a bullet-hell survival game and seeing where I get with it. I’ll enjoy making it.

I’m building completely from scratch in HTML5 Canvas with no engine or anything beacuse this is the kind of game I can get away with doing that in.

I’ve held off on writing this because I was waiting for reviews and issues to come in so I’d have something to post-mortemise about.

I have been sat here most of the afternoon playing and rating games, whilst reading the ratings on my own game in case things were broken.

Actually, nothing is broken apart from Audio – which is the usual story with HTML5 games even in these days (sadface), so I uploaded a fix that on platforms where it wasn’t going to work, that audio could at least be disabled (it was only generated fuzzy noise anyway).

Lesson learned there, TEST ALL THE BROWSERS

What else have I learned? Well, I actually finished my entire game by the end of Saturday, by doing the following things

Using an engine so I didn’t even once have to worry about collision, pixels, rendering, etc

Focusing on the game, rather than art or sounds

Keeping my features to the bare minimum and making sure there was an end-to-end experience in place

Following that, I spent a few hours when I was tired

Making some art

Generating some sounds

Playing and noting the things that annoyed me

Getting other people to play it and noting things that annoyed them

The next day was solely spent just making the game fun toplay

Yes indeed, after spending about 8 hours building the game, I then spent about 8 hours in the following loop

Play the game

Note down what wasn’t fun

Think of a way to fix the problem raised by #2

Implement the fix for the problem raised by #2

Goto 1

It seems to have paid off, as the reviews being written are favourable indeed, my favourite being

“Easily gets into my top 3 of LD25! Keep it up!”

I am strongly encouraged by this as a note of the things I have learned at past Ludum Dares and now cannot wait until the next one where I might try to be a bit more ambitious but still try to “finish the game by the end of day #1” as that really seems to be the best way forward.

I left myself a to-do list last night and I want to get cracking through it as I’ve got ideas about sound that I want to explore with all of the spare time I have given the game is already ‘finished’ !! 😀

Time flies when you’re sat on a train, I’ve now made it to a friend’s house and am sat in a chair writing some code.

A few hours in and I have a centipede, and a deployment plan and a server and the basic gameplay of centipede vs defence unit vs bullets done

Not very sexy I know, I’ll do all the graphics tomorrow once I have all the bits put into this. I’m quite enjoying using an engine for a change – makes things a lot less stressful for this sort of compo.

So I’m the Villain? I’m currently sat on a train on the way to a gathering in Reading where they’ll be working on a jam and I’ll be doing a solo effort in about.. err 30 hours.

I think I’m going to write a clone of “Centipede”, the classic game from ye olde, only you get to control the Centipede and avoid being shot at whilst picking up all the gardens flowers and vegetables.

I’ll be using ImpactJS to get me ahead of things, and probably SpriteMe on the iPad to create my assets.

I will likely be using https://github.com/robashton/swallow for my assets, and I will be throwing up another small OSS library for doing camera/scaling in a pixel-independent manner this week, (extracted from a game I’m working on).

If anybody wants to come to my house in Belgium on Friday and hang around until the very end of all this, then they’re completely welcome (not a game-jam effort, just working solo , together). It’s more fun with company.